A monster most every weekday. Three adventure seeds a post.
Because Pathfinder and 3.5 are more fun than work.
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Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Etiainen

Oh, fantasy role-playing editors!When will you set aside your anti-umlaut
prejudices?First you morph the doppelgänger (from the German,
“double-goer”) into doppelganger (from the West Side, “Warren G and Nate Dogg”).Then you turn the exuberantly
quadruple-tittled etiäinen into the
workaday etiainen.Honestly, it’s enough to make a man scheißen.

That said, the etiainen is a pretty cool monster.It’s based on a Finnish house spirit that is
a manifestation of a sort of pre-jà vu (now I’m
the one mangling language)—that feeling you get, for instance, when you think
you hear someone come in the door, but no one is there, only to have them
arrive five minutes later in exactly the manner you imagined.

That’s not exactly the easiest concept to base a dungeon
monster around, but the Bestiary 5 is
game to try.It makes the etiainen a psychic
entity (“amalgams of the past
and the future”) that can cause minor effects around the house, mimic people, and
confuse them with deja vu and
memory drain abilities.All in all, it
makes for a unique take on the house spirt concept, and it’s perfect at the CR
1 challenge level.As I’ve mentioned
dozens of times on this blog, I love low-level monsters that give new
characters something to face besides rats and goblins.And with combat being so high-stakes at
1st-level, it’s nice to have a good mystery plot or a monsters that take a lot
of investigation to uproot—lots of excuses for skill checks, good role-playing,
and story XP awards instead of stabbing your way to 2nd level.So the etiainen should definitely pop up in
your next low-level adventure, especially if you want to add a little Scandinavian
flair.

An etiainen developed
an attachment to an innkeeper’s husband, mimicking his movements and
foretelling his actions.When the man
died cold and alone on a hunting trip after being mauled by a polar bear, the
forlorn etiainen became resentful—particularly of all the inn patrons who
indulged in the waystation’s celebrated sauna huts.His coy pranks have become dangerous, and
since a guest nearly died of heatstroke when the etiainen locked him in one of
the huts, the innkeeper is now looking to pacify or exorcise the spirit.

An etiainen lives in
the shadow of a great clock tower, acting out scenes from a murder it
witnessed before appearing to wink out of existence.Adventurers who study the etiainen’s behavior
more than once might realize that it acts out the same actions at precisely the
same time every night—a possible clue overlooked by the Watch.Following up this lead could call into
question the alibi of one of the suspects.

A bartender is
convinced he has a clurichaun (a variant leprechaun) on the premises.He thinks if he can capture it, the fey will
boost his fortunes.He cajoles some
local youths into helping him hunt the clurichaun, but what they discover
instead is an etiainen.Assuming they
don’t destroy it, the etiainen can reveal details of a battle fought where the
bar now stands—including the burial chambers where a fallen lord’s grave gods still
lie unclaimed.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5
111

The
Norwegian term for the etiainen is
vardøger, another excellent word.The Irish fetch is another similar
creature.(Actually, I’m kind of stunned
“fetch” hasn’t been used as a name in the Bestiaries
already…the closest we have so far is the fetchling.Maybe for B6?)

By the way, please forgive the occasional typos. I am aware of them, but disagreements between MS Word and the Blogger template make my entries nearly impossible to edit once posted. I blame gremlins. You can find a more polished version of this blog over on Tumblr.